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Well, Harvard was just her example. She has also been on the board of admissions at CCOM, so I'm sure she recognizes the diversity in D.O applicants vs. MD applicants. I think her point was that a B at one school does not necessarily equal a B at another school, and that they recognize that. Her "modifier" details were in response to a student's questions about how they distinguish grades between a student in a more difficult science program than another.
I understand, but my point was more that such methodology is filled with pitfalls. They're basing the modifier on reputation, but that doesn't take into account the factors I discussed (and a whole host of other factors I didn't). For example, you can take my CC vs State U to the extreme: you might have an adjunct who lectures at both Harvard and a CC in the Boston area. They may teach the exact same class (it is a real pain to prepare different lectures for the same class) and might, in fact, grade harder at Boston Community College than at Harvard (less admin pressure for grade inflation). The student who did 2 years at Boston CC and then transferred to U Mass would be pegged down relative to a Harvard applicant despite them both having the same classes the first two years from the same profs.
That's an extreme example, but it illustrates the potential difficulty in applying modifiers to grades in order to standardize them. Now they may well take into account CCs that have high transfer rates to top universities and weigh those differently than CCs with poor reputations. They might weigh grades from state Us with top notch research programs equally to Ivy Leagues. And maybe, on average, this methodology captures most of the does an adequate job. But I tend to suspect it is based on reputation more than anything. And reputation matters--it's been earned in many cases. But it may not be terribly objective, nor exhaustive.